Stile: Christie’s Mexico trip won’t address immigration

Governor Christie ripped President Obama this summer for failing to carve out some time during a Texas fundraising swing to visit the Mexican border, where the unprecedented flood of immigrant children from Central America had reached a crisis point.

“That’s just an indication of his unwillingness to lead. He wants us all to step up to the plate, right?” Christie said at a policy forum in Colorado. “The president is just not there.”

Yet Christie is not squeezing in a tour of the troubled border during his own three-day trade and diplomatic mission to Mexico, which is set to begin on Wednesday. The governor is planning a series of meetings with Mexican officials, including President Enrique Peña Nieto and the finance and energy ministers.

Christie, one of the nation’s most prominent Republicans, brushed aside any suggestion of hypocrisy in his not scheduling his own border visit while having been quick to criticize the president for not doing so. There really was no point in going, he said. After all, the federal government is responsible for managing the crisis, which has led to some 57,000 migrants, many of them children, flooding the U.S. since October.

The teeming border is Obama’s challenge, not his.

“If I went down there and looked at it, what steps am I supposed to take exactly? Send the New Jersey National Guard there?” Christie said last week during a visit to the Jersey Shore.

Still, Christie’s avoidance of the border illustrates the delicate political balancing act that he faces if, as many expect, he makes the transition from celebrity Republican governor to candidate for president in 2016.

Staying away also allows him to maintain a safe distance from the hot-button issue, which has alarmed the nation, renewed demands for immigration reform and divided the GOP in a debate over its relationship with the Latino community — and potential Latino voters.

Christie, whose support of in-state tuition rates for the children of immigrants who are in New Jersey illegally helped him win an eye-popping 51 percent of the Latino vote in his reelection last year, is betting the party will pick an establishment moderate as its nominee, not an ideological purist.

So far, he has carefully navigated a bitter divide within the party by taking positions that might make him more electable in a general contest without inflaming the vocal and influential Tea Party base that dominates Republican primaries. He has studiously kept a low profile on national issues, which in part has meant avoiding a position on the border crisis or overall immigration reform.

A tour of the border — where Christie could meet immigration advocates, agents and even migrants in detention facilities — could upend this balancing act, analysts say. An empathetic, visibly concerned Christie, who has built a reputation for brokering bipartisan deals, could alienate conservatives and seal-the-border hard-liners or even provoke their fears that he might support granting legal status to the estimated 11 million immigrants who’ve already entered the country illegally.

“He’s already in the minds of hard-liners as sort of suspicious,” said Louis DeSipio, an expert on Latin American immigration and voting issues at the University of California, Irvine. “He doesn’t want to reinforce that with a trip to the border.”

Analysts also say a border visit could open Christie to charges that he is cynically using the trip to Mexico to lay the groundwork for 2016.

“It’s probably not wise for him to go and get involved in an issue that he really doesn’t have any direct influence over and be criticized for grandstanding,” said Jose Mallea, national strategic director of the LIBRE Initiative, a Republican-leaning immigration-reform group.

But most observers agree that planned meetings with Mexico’s business and political elite could yield significant benefits for a possible run for president. The most obvious is that it will bolster Christie’s thin foreign-policy résumé.

But it will also broaden his appeal with Latino voters, among the nation’s fastest-growing voting blocs. A record 12.5 million Latino voters participated in the 2012 election, a 30 percent jump from 2008, and a nearly 240 percent increase since 1988. And those numbers will only continue to rise: The Pew Center for Hispanic Research estimates that Latino voters will make up 40 percent of the growth in the U.S. electorate over the next 15 years.

What alarms Republicans is that a majority of Latinos support Democrats. In 2012, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney captured a dismal 27 percent of their vote. Party activists acknowledge that they need a swift turnaround in Latino support by 2016 or risk another four or eight years of Democrats living in the White House.

The last victorious Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, captured 44 percent of the Latino vote in 2004.

“Going to Mexico is a way of showing a tremendous amount of interest in the native country of our immigrants,” said Carlos Gutierrez, a former commerce secretary under Bush. He said Latinos believe that most Republicans are generally hostile to their concerns.

“I just wish more Republicans would do this,” Gutierrez said in a telephone interview.

Christie’s high-profile visit should also produce useful tools for the nuts-and-bolts operation of a presidential race. The positive video of Christie warmly greeting Mexican officials and interacting with average citizens in a scheduled visit to Puebla, a small city that is the native home of a large number of Mexicans living in New Jersey, will be broadcast on Spanish-speaking stations around the country. And some of those images will likely be recycled in campaign ads — if, in fact, he does campaign.

“The optics will be good,” said Frank Argote-Freyre, president of the Latino Action Network, a Democratic-aligned group, who believes that New Jersey’s in-state tuition law overshadows short­com­ings in Christie’s record on Latino issues — including budget cuts that forced 11,000 legal immigrants from a state health care program, opposition to the minimum-wage hike and reduction in a tax credit for working poor families.

“A family sitting down at their nightly meal, watching Telemundo, will say: ‘Look at that! He’s wearing a sombrero. He’s in Mexico. I can relate to him,’Ÿ” Argote-Freyre said.

Despite avoiding the border — and the governor has said that he does not plan to make immigration a focal point of any discussions during the trip — many expect Christie to be pressed to talk about those issues by Mexican officials and the media that will follow him.

That may pose a test for Christie, who has proved to be pretty nimble in deflecting tough questions. He may punt, belittle the question or even use the opportunity to clarify where he stands in the volatile debate over immigration. All of that remains to be seen.

But one thing is certain. If and when he does talk, he will be far from the Mexican border.